Brighton SEO September 2017 - The Takeaways

18th September 2017

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Sophia Evans

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The second BrightonSEO of 2017 was even bigger and better than before, digital experts flocked once again to the SEO hub of Brighton to delve into the latest trends in search and social. The event, created by founder Kelvin Newman, saw 1000s of digital marketers come from across the globe to learn about the mind-blowing trends of 2018 and what we should be focusing on. Our Climb Online team have put together the key takeaways below:

1. Cristoph Cemper discussed a trick to improving search traffic, most SEO’s only look at a small portion of backlinks, however it is important to remove the bad links and revive broken ones. Link research tools can give marketers a wider view of the backlinks.

2. SEO Ranking Factors does not have the same impact to all industries. Some industries may benefit better from a portion of ranking factors, others may see an impact from another ranking factor better.

3. Chloe Bodard did a talk on quick wins in technical SEO. I knew most of the content presented but there were some new things I can all look out for when managing campaigns, i.e. optimizing crawl budgets.

1. GTM (Google Tag Manager ) is very powerful, and can even be used to make some SEO changes, without the developer (if they are being unhelpful and unwilling) – but should always try to have these changes hardcoded for best results – Yet it is possible to rank even if not hardcoded in less competitive industries.

2. The future of search is going to change, one interesting insight is that Google can be feed data directly without a site, and this is going to become even more important due to the growth of the Internet of Things (connected technology/voice search)

3. To appear in voice search, it is important to rank in position 1(to 3).

4. 301’s should be minimised, and to maximise link equity it is best to have direct links, this was not new, but is good to hear that I am not fighting this battel alone (so just reinforcement)

5. Working on improving the bots ability to crawl is key (Again not new to me, and is something I often push for, and was good to hear other experts think the same too. So simply more reinforcement)

6. Gary Illyes, of Google, hinted that within the next few weeks it is likely that Google will switch over to mobile first indexing. Which will likely effect those with more than one version of their sites, where the content is not on both versions.

As Social Media continues to become more congested and advertising space increases in competitiveness, finding new strategies to present content and advertising in a unique and effective way through data analysis was the focal point of Septembers Social Media agenda.

1. The common theme across the Facebook dialogue was very much ‘quality vs quantity’ now that the platform has run out of advertising space. Susan Wenograd explained her process when planning an effective Paid Facebook strategy that separates potential audiences into “cold, warm, and hot” and tailoring the user’s ad experience depending on their stage in the buying cycle. This is to be followed up by fresh ad content to prevent audiences from becoming “immune” to a campaign.

2. Luke Knight discussed “The Trump Card” where he revealed the results from his analysis of Donald Trump’s extremely successful Presidential Election campaign across Facebook and Twitter. Trump’s party had worked in conjunction with Harvard researchers to gather information across a range of platforms including Netflix to target younger voters on Social platforms and at one point had 40-50k different targeted paid advertisements appearing. He then explained how this information can be tailored to create an equally effective brand campaign by understanding the customer persona, building an influencer network, thinking outside of the “Social Media box”, and creating content that can be user-generated.

3. Finally, Hannah Dempsey discussed Social Listening and the process of researching the way that users are discussing your product outside of just your immediate branding using multiple platforms. You can then take this information and create a much more effective campaign with a more detailed understanding of your consumer behavior.

1. Sebastien Monnier, from Woptimo, discussed how you could create page titles and meta descriptions within Google Tag Manager.

2. Cindy Krum, Chief Executive Officer of MobileMoxie, LLC explored Google are now indexing non URL items like sound files a good example of this is if you Google “cow sound” this may be an interesting area to look into going forward.

3. Duane Forrester VP, Industry Insights at Yext discussed the importance of using Schema markup, for image search the emergence of Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence in search. In addition to this, he also mentioned the four main voice search devices such as Amazon Echo, Google Home, Cortanna (Microsoft) and Siri (iPhone).

Additional take aways;

– Focus on longtail keywords.

– Build detailed answers

– Make sure your website is clean and accessible

– Mobile friendly matters

– Secure your website move to HTTPS

So there you have it! A full list of Brighton SEO takeaways. If you have any questions on anything mentioned above, please get in touch today! In case you missed it here’s a list of takeaways from Brighton SEO April 2017.